Childhood obesity

Neglect.

The OP and her DH are on the 'brink of obesity' too according to the opening post.

Maybe not the point of your post but you seem absolutely oblivious to what you’re doing to your poor child. Are you even embarrassed by the lifestyle that you have described?

Christ OP, your post describes an exceptionally unhealthy child, even if he’s not obese. Judging by his diet, lifestyle and obese parents, I would say it’s only a matter of time. Why are you allowing this to happen?

OP: your diet and lifestyle will catch up with your kid, at some point, and fast. He probably has a very fast kiddo metabolism right now. This will stop and you will find yourself a mother of an obese child. Change while you can.

yes. But I think it' goes further than this and it's in lots of small but cumulative things from bigger gardens to more opportunities generally for wealthier children - if you are sending your children to private school, there's a higher chance you're also out and about on weekeneds with lots of walking and moving from country walks to trips to museums to weekends away. Plus lots more opportunity for extracurricular things from football to rugby to dance to netball to golf.

It's not definitive - eg Ds has a number of children he's friends with at his local high school who come from less financially advantaged children adn whlie they're not doing all the extracurriciular and trips into London etc, they ARE far more independent at getting themselves aroudn on bikes/walking etc. But they don't do the variety of extra curricular mine do, and they have never had a city break walking all day, and they aren't doing day trips into London to see a show or go to a musuem or whatever.

So it's not one thing, and one thing only.

It’s common in these discussions to talk about how cheap carrots are. What that doesn’t give credit to is the overall cost per calorie. A mini pizza from Aldi is 70p, that’s a full meal. Three carrots isn’t a meal, it needs protein and fat and other food items. batch cooking requires time, effort, storage space, equipment, experience and a store cupboard. That’s before expecting a child used to a certain way of eating even is tempted to try it.

community larders with access to dried herbs and spices and ingredients in small quantities and weigh and pay shops can help.

It’s complicated, but also simple. Taking in more energy than one uses will lead to being overweight. The reasons why one overconsumes is complex.

Car dependency doesn’t necessarily track, lots of people in low income households are reliant on public transport.

however, being reliant on public transport does make attending after school and evening activities much more difficult. Unless activities are very local they may be off limits.

It's hard to eat healthily on a budget

This always gets trotted out on these threads.

I batch cook from scratch, we have very few UPF's and the majority of our food is vegetarian/ vegan. We are not overweight, even though siblings, cousins and parents are in our family.

The issues are far more complicated than the availability of cheap healthy foods.

It's about time & energy to cook after a long day, cooking skills and the ease of convince foods that are at the heart of the problem. If you have a very tight budget, you're more inclined to go for that unhealthy frozen pizza that you know DC will eat, then try something new that will potentially end up in the bin.

Car dependency and poorly designed towns are killing us.

I do wonder if PS take sports and PE more seriously and this has an impact?

There are more fat adults and fat adults tend to produce fat kids.

There are more fat adults as we are sedentary. Sedentary adults don't spend active leisure time with their kids or walk or cycle places with their kids. Kids are more sedentary as they aren't free range in their neighourhoods anymore. Research has been done into how kids free movement in their neighbourhoods has declined over the decades.

I was raised in the 70/80s and I did not eat healthily but I was very active, as were all my peers. Nothing formal, just running free range where I lived and walked everywhere.

Schools and nurseries are absurdly safety conscious which limits kids' activitiy and physical capability, (its much worse that when I was at school) and, worse parents absorb these ridiculous levels of safety concern and behave the same way with their kids.

Portions sizes are much bigger now..

Around Christmas time, my children were playing in the bath (age 7 and 5), and I noticed they were getting a little chunky. I weight them and measured them and they were both 80th percentile.

We completely overhauled their diet as of that day, and are now sitting at 45th and 50th percentile.

We swapped out loads of processed food, and changed all rice and pasta to wholemeal. We started to limit sweets to weekend, and gave up squash entirely.

My children are at PS, and it is extremely rare to see overweight children. There are probably 5 in the whole school and they are noticeable in assemblies.

Healthy, non processed food is expensive, and takes time to prepare.

I have weight problem mai ly due to overeating. I k ow it stems from childhood as my mum would give me same portion sizes as my dad and then seconds and thirds - I'm talking meat and potatoes not veg . Iv been very aware not to put my own issues on my children but iv also discussed eating to fuel our bodies and only eating until we are full. They have couple hobbies so out being active 4 nights a week. Iv been lucky so far with mine.

It does bemused me however with some friends who are mums and overweight who have overweight pre teen and teen girls and their mothers just say oh they are just built like me. Usually because their sons arnt overweight as they usually doing a sport

Google epigenetics + obesity.

It's difficult to pin point what's caused it.

I was raised eating half good homecooked food, and half absolute junk. I had chocolate wheetos, Frosties, Sugar Puffs or coco pops for breakfast. I had jam sandwiches on white bread for lunch, a wagon wheel and a can of coke!
I ate SO many sweets.

I'm 41 and just had my first filling last year! I've also only ever been slim, despite never being encouraged to do any exercise,although I've ended up an exercise fanatic as an adult (mum has never done any and has been overweight her whole life). I'm from a working class background, but my middle class friends had similar diets (lots of chicken kievs, "micro chips" (remember those?) and other junk foods). When we got to secondary school and had our own pocket money, everyone bought doughnuts by the bag, and chips from the chippy at lunch time, on top of their packed lunch. We were all stick thin.

Is it the sheer availability and portion sizes of food now? I ate lots of crap, but never in the form of massive takeaways. And portion sizes across the board were very small. I had a can of coke a day, but it would have been one of those mini ones - we never had access to big bottles to pour our own. Remember how tiny an old school packet of Walkers crisps used to be?

Mum was fanatical about making me drink a lot of milk! I still love it today, I don't know if there's anything in that.

Also, I know you will say "not the point of the post" but then why list his diet?

Probably the type of food available, at least in part. Orwell was writing over a hundred years ago about how the availability of sugar changed the face of food in poverty in the west and it's clear to see the effect the progression of that over that period of time.

I am alarmed at what your child eats tbh... he might not be fat now but he will be quite soon!

Based on mine and DH's genetics and the DCs so far, there's a lot of luck... until 30 when we need to be more concious about fuelling our bodies. So we do need to be raising our DCs with knowledge of good nutrition and movement habits to give them a good foundation for life even if teenage growth spurts are giving them a lot of slack at the moment.

My observation of some families I've known long term (poverty not being a factor) is that their children were always heavy early on... it was just "puppy fat" to begin with... then the yR and y6 letters were obviously wrong because they're just "big boned". They were children not naturally inclined to be energetic to start with, but the heavier you get, the harder it is to be energetic.

I've known Cubs struggling with basic movements like getting up off a floor, or climbing around age appropriate play areas. Any attempt at running rapidly ends up in a red-faced, sweaty mess and it must feel so unpleasant for the child, and it's discouraging for them to keep participating. Even walking is very slow and ploddy. When they do sport like football, there's a lot of still time loitering (often in goal). The parents massively over-estimate the quantity and quality of the movement that their children are getting, and out of balance with their intake of food.

On one walk the pace was painfully slow to the point that the organisers thought we had an incident because it took so long to reach a checkpoint. The children had huge lunch boxes rammed with sandwiches, yoghurts, cakes, biscuits, crisps, cheese, peperami. It was something of everything; not a cake or a biscuit, a cheese or a peperami. And the volume of food (and drinks) made the bags really heavy for the children to carry.

It's not helped by the marketing of sweet, bland aesthetic foods at children, or the prevelence of excessively sweet/ fatty items like freakshakes. Traditional diets of regular adult food aren't promoted, and it's difficult if children don't have a taste for a balanced range of food. (Sensory issues are a whole other league)

There's also an issue of Disney Dads/ NRP or childcare by extended family where children are regularly over-fed with love or to keep children quiet, and that's difficult for the resident parent to balance the consumption up. Weekly patterns aren't treats, they're routines.

It's incredibly sad and is setting the children up for a difficult unhealthy life that is hard to turn around. The parents often have their own poor habits and are often in denial or lack knowledge, but its such an emotive subject to deal with.

This is an interesting topic so I’ll add my data. I’m a single parent on a below- average income. I have two children who are slim and fit. They eat way too much sugar at the weekends and we are a pescatarian family who eat lots of carbs. We have active dogs so walk a lot and have easy access to beautiful walks. They walk to school and have lots of physical chores to do at home such as mowing the lawn. One does karate and goes to the gym after school. If we do Parkrun, they can easily out pace me. So I would say that regular physical exercise plays a big part. I also cook from scratch 80% of the time and was raised that way.

I was a slim child and adult right until my 30s but then stacked on weight due to sedentary life style and wine. I’ve lost all the excess now and trying to instill the importance of exercise and moderation in the DC. In our community, I see so many obese kids. Our neighbours would drive their very obese kids to school each day (10 minute walk).

Yes, this.

I’ve been slim all my life but I haven’t always been healthy or done much exercise. In my twenties I survived almost exclusively on pizza and chocolate but not enough of it to make me overweight. I had friends who were heavier but probably healthier as they were eating more nutritious food (but more calories overall than me).

I do believe some people are just more drawn to food and find it more difficult to resist than others. And lots of people are just not sporty...i have one DC who loves sport and another who absolutely hates it and dreads pe. But, you are the parent and it is your responsibility to try to get him into good habits now....for his future health at least

II think the OP is wondering why her son is slim in spite of the things she lists. Diet, sedentary lifestyle, overweight parents.
So why is he slim in spite of this? Is it because he is not underprivileged?
A lot is in the genes IMO. Diet can overcome a natural tendency to be fat or thin but not entirely.
You don't give his age, my guess would be he's still very young and these factors may well lead to weight gain just prior to puberty.

We are slim parents from slim families, used to eating what we like. Both DC were skinny up to age 10 in spite of being allowed to pretty much eat anything as long as they ate the healthy stuff as well .
The elder one spent his teens trying to gain weight and as an adult is very slim. The younger one started to look chubby around 10 and still is age 25. It was difficult to manage as he was never able to eat the same as his sibling.